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hurtling through the air. Claude didn’t look back, his AK clutched tightly to his chest; all his attention was focused on the road ahead and the gray sky peeking through the canopy, threatening further rain.

Chapter 3
    Five days ago, Dmitrov, Moscow, Russia
     
    A stiff breeze rustled the treetops along Zagorskaya Boulevard as the sun sank into the distant horizon, leaving bleak silhouettes of Soviet-era apartment blocks outlined against a salmon sky. Couples meandered hand in hand along the wide thoroughfare, carved wooden statues from a nearby park watching like silent guards. The growl of a diesel motor echoed off the road as an overloaded bus lumbered from the direction of the railyard, belching black clouds as it transported tired workers home, their lives little changed from when they had toiled on behalf of a Communist apparatus.
    Smoke stacks thrust heavenward from the darkened masses of factories near residential neighborhoods with cancer rates six times the national average. The square shape of an ancient Lada Vaz-2101 sedan turned onto the boulevard. Its onetime blue exterior was now faded to a gunmetal gray that matched the pavement, and its fenders and doors were eroded from road salt and the elements. The driver switched on the weak headlights as dusk approached and drove with caution into the city’s industrial area, a section that the recent gentrification of the metropolis had ignored.
    Inside the car, a woman in her thirties watched the buildings go by, her lips compressed into a thin line. The driver, a portly bearded man wearing a multicolored sweater several decades out of fashion, gripped the wheel with whitened knuckles, his eyes concentrating on the road as brake lights flashed their warning of a stalled van ahead. The woman checked her watch – a cheap Chinese model made from black plastic – and exhaled impatiently.
    “This is taking forever,” she hissed angrily.
    “Don’t worry. We’re not that late,” the driver reassured her. He glanced at the leather satchel by her feet. “The others are right behind us.”
    Their Russian was lightly colored with the accent of the south, as distinctive as the American variation of English from its southern states. Here, near Moscow, it sounded out of place, the huge city’s pronunciation faster-clipped and more abrasive. Denizens of the capital city, the largest in Russia and a melting pot of ethnicities, quickly adopted the urban cadence and looked with disdain at those with more languorous speech, considering any but Muscovites provincial.
    Yulia and Taras had been in Russia for six weeks, networking with like-minded Ukrainians to organize financial support for their cause. They wanted to rid their country once and for all of what they thought of as Russian lice perverting their nation’s heritage, and considered the pro-Russian insurgent forces in the North and East to be traitors. Their leadership had hatched a plan where they could use Russian-built missiles to attack civilian locations, creating the impression that the Russians were engaging in war crimes, which would in turn force the Russians to pull out of the country, their denials hollow to a world accustomed to government lies.
    Subterfuge was the order of the day, and in order to garner the trust of the mafia in Moscow, they’d posed as pro-Russian guerrillas in need of weaponry to aid in the rebellion against the Ukrainian government. Even the organized criminal elements that operated in Russia for their enrichment would balk at selling pro-Ukrainian separatists missiles, no matter the profit to be made, but the palatable lie that they were really more or less on the same side had been effective.
    The meeting on the outskirts of Dmitrov to which they were headed was the culmination of weeks of negotiations with an offshoot of the Russian mob whose primary business was trafficking in arms stolen from the army. Each year five to ten percent of all weapons and armaments in official